After Death Communication:
A New Therapy for Healing Grief and Trauma by Allan L. Botkin, Psy.D. with R. Graig
Hogan, Ph.D.
Book Review by Marie-Claire Wilson
Allan Botkin, received his Doctor
of Psychology degree from Baylor University in 1983. For the next
20 years, he worked in private practice and as a staff psychologist
for the Department of Veterans Affairs in the Chicago area. His
specialty is the diagnosis and treatment of post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD). He has also published scientific papers in the
areas of brain function, PTSD, and eye-movement desensitization
and reprocessing (EMDR.) He is curently the director of the Center
for Grief and Traumatic Loss, LLC in Libertyville, Illinois. For
more information on IADC therapy and training go to www.inducedadc.com.
R.Graig Hogan, Ph.D., is owner and director of the Business Writing
Center, an online school that trains business writers around the
world (http:writingtrainers.com). He is the author of Explicit
Business Writing, a book describing today’s best practices
in business writing He co-authored a book for school administrators,
teaching them how to work more cooperatively and productively with
teachers, and is co-author of the Personal Styles Inventory based
on Carl Jung’s work. You can reach him at r.craig.hogan@induced-adc.com
or 800-690-4232.
After Death Communication: A New Therapy for
Healing Grief and Trauma is a book that will gently hold you and show you the light
at the end of the tunnel, no matter how deep your grief. The authors,
Allan L. Botkin and R. Graig Hogan, give you the tools of a new
therapy that has been helping millions of people who have found
themselves faced with the trauma of the death of a loved one.
Greif is a different process for every person. For every person
that we lose, depending on their relationship to us, we experience
quite a lot of grief. It dose not matter if it’s the death
of a loved one, or of some family member or relative, a friend,
or, in some cases, even at the death of a person that we did not
like. With this new, miraculous therapy, the author helps us heal
our grief and loss by allowing us to experience it as private communication
with our departed loved ones.
First of all, the authors talk about the main questions. They begin
with the question, ‘What is death?’ Death is the natural
consequence of a life that ends in a transformation, and in the
case of a natural death, the physical organs may be used up from
the experience of life. When the natural forces of life have ceased
to rhythmically circulate in the living being, or when there is
an event so great that it causes some kind of organ failure, the
body simply cannot continue to go on in this life path. The soul
pulls out and the “machine” that remains, that is,
the body, stops. That is what we call physical death.
Human beings
are similar to caterpillars in that we go through this stage of life,
then we go through the chrysalis stage which seems static in appearance.
Inside that chrysalis, there is a lot of work that goes on to, in
due course, develop into the beautiful butterflies, which must then
liberate themselves from that chrysalis. This
labor of liberation is also what we call life. When we die,
our material elements fall apart and dissolve. As everyone
knows, when we are buried, we decompose rather slowly and eventually
become part of the very soil of the Earth. However, there is more. We
yield in the form of solid, liquid, and gaseous elements that separate
out as we truly become part of the Earth, water, air, and even
fire. It’s the energetic principles that escape the
body, just as the caterpillar gives up material and energetic parts
of its substance in its transformation which is also a definite
decomposition. The outer layers of the caterpillar dies off
and new parts form until there is a tightly wound butterfly formed
(trans-formed). So it is with our immortal soul that escapes
our body, which decomposes and transforms into all of those elements,
and we reform into a new being in a new form.
The authors go on here to give us surprising news: these new forms of being that
we take on when we die and transform make us capable of communicating with human
beings in one fashion or another. Sometimes humans living in this mortal
body are visited by the newly transformed beings, our loved ones.
How does death happen? There are basically three phases. In the beginning
phase, when we sense that imminent death is inevitable, most people have at least
a little fear that we will certainly die. Then there is a kind of liberation,
where all of the multiple lives within us are freed. This phase brings us to
a state of surprise for some, and anguish for others. How we experience
it will depend on the level to which we have evolved spiritually. During this
phase, it’s as if we have one foot in the physical plane and one foot in
the spiritual. There is a kind of agony at this juncture, and it is the
most painful of the three phases. As the author notes, the more spiritually
evolved we are, the more there is surprise and the less there is anguish. The
third phase is the disengagement of this world and movement toward the next dimension
of our existence, and a revelation to our soul that this is our journey.
For us to be able to communicate with people who have died, we
must understand this entire process. The authors give us many
examples of patients confronted with the trauma of the death of
someone dear, and then they describe the startling and extraordinary
experiences that they have had surrounding these deaths.
One of my favorite chapters is the one on how forgiveness heals, “Forgiveness
in IADC (induced after death communication) Heals - Anger and Guilt.” As
to how to heal anger and guilt through forgiveness, the authors
give us a perfect quotation from the great master Buddha. This
quote has been variously translated, and you may have heard it
in one form or another before, but it bears repeating here: “Anger
is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone
else. But you are the one who gets burned!”
This chapter offers many good and practical tools to heal ourselves. The
authors write, “the experience of guilt is a normal, healthy
psychological function. Conscience and consideration for others
guide our behavior. So when we do something in conflict with
our conscience, we experience the unpleasant feeling of guilt. To
avoid the averse guilt feelings, we likely will alter future behavior
to appease our conscience.”
Then the authors speak about IADC: “every IADC induced
thus far has been positive and none negative… Some near-death
experiences described in the literature have negative content. [But]
in the more than three thousand IADC [experiences] that we have
induced thus far, not one has contained negative content.”
One of the best examples, and the one that I liked the most on
a personal level, is in a section where the authors describe some
interesting encounters that their patients experienced. One
of the authors writes, “I was very amused by the experience
[of] a patient named Dan. When he attempted to have an IADC
induction procedure, Dan closed his eyes thinking about his brother,
then suddenly opened them with a start. He blurted out, with
his eyes wide, ‘I felt huge claws clamping around me.’ I
said, ‘Dan, these experiences have so far always been positive. Go
back to it and find out what happened.’ Trusting me, he agreed
to go back to the IADC, focusing on his brother again. I administered
another set of eye movements, and he closed his eyes. In a
moment, he smiled. After few seconds, he opened his eyes and
said, ‘I saw my brother this time. It was just like
we were together before he died, and I felt I could just talk to
him. I asked him if he knew what the claw thing was. He said
it wasn’t a claw, he was giving me a big hug, and he hugged
me again, and I could feel it. My brother’s Ok.…’ ”
For me, the experience recounted above contains the essence of
this book. Reading about the work of the authors, we can see
why it is so important to understand the phenomenon of death before
we can truly connect with those who have passed into that other
dimension. Death as a symbol represents all that is perishable
and destructible in our current existence. Death indicates
what disappears from us in the inevitable evolution of things,
and death is intimately connected to the symbolism of the Earth.
Death is both revelation and a beginning. When we use the tools
of this new therapy that you will find in this book, I think that
you will be as impressed as I was to learn how easy it is to understand
and be receptive to this other higher dimension of consciousness,
so that we can communicate with, and even see, the person who has
died. The most positive experiences of all are when we do
it all by ourselves without having to go through an intermediary. It
is at this moment when the channel is open and we are the most
openly receptive to connecting with the deceased. The process
is not easy, and we must allow ourselves to take the time to heal. In
the grieving process, we must pass through all those familiar stages
first and arrive at a kind of healing. The experience of communicating
with the dead can happen on an individual level or in a group setting. It’s
different for each person.
After reading this book, a poem came to my mind that I would
like to share with you here: I say to you that the tomb
That closes over the dead,
Opens up to all of the heavens,
And that what we take as the ending here,
Is really just the beginning…
Marie-Claire
Wilson, author of the Spiritual Tarot: The Keys to the Divine Temple,
is a bilingual writer and poet. She has been a practicing medium
for 28 years using direct clairvoyance, the Tarot, numerology and
palmistry. For an appointment face-to-face or phone readings call:
404.847.7330
www.Marie-Claire.tv
Marie-Claire
Wilson, author of the Spiritual Tarot: The Keys to the Divine Temple,
is a bilingual writer and poet. She has been a practicing medium
for 28 years using direct clairvoyance, the Tarot, numerology and
palmistry. For an appointment face-to-face or phone readings call:
404.847.7330 
